Guidance from the Future

explores the nature of problems and why we struggle so much with change. She offers some simple guidance on how to approach transformation, in everyday life as well as in the field of spirituality, and how to take help from others, including a spiritual guide.

- B.J. LEVIN O'RIORDAN

I am grateful to my friend E.W. for bringing the Golden Key into my life.

I believe that problems result from the benign conspiracy between two agents who we are now and who we are becoming. Our current limitations give us the motivation to take the next step, but those very limitations don't allow us to take that step. The purpose of the problem is to enable us to become a new person operating from a frame of reference beyond the previous set of limitations.

For example, a five-year-old child is ready to go to school. The family’s love, in which she has basked since birth, has given her the confidence to explore, discover, and relate to others. She needs these abilities, but now that she is at school, she can no longer behave like the family’s darling. She won't get away with it! The very purpose of the problem school is to enable her to emerge from the old version of herself into a new version. She can no longer use baby ways, like crying, to get what she wants. To solve the problem, she has to behave like and become a school-aged child.

This pattern of development persists throughout our lives. A child cannot use childish ways to solve the problems imposed by puberty, so the child becomes an adolescent and solves the problems from that perspective. An adolescent cannot use adolescent ways to solve the problems imposed by adulthood, so they become an adult.

We cannot ever solve a new problem by being who we are. We solve it from the perspective of who we are going to become.

Throughout our lives, others help us negotiate these rites of passage. At each stage, we have guides from the past and guides from the future. The guides from the past ideally help us to retain the best of the old values, and the guides from the future usher us into the new perspectives necessary for our future selves.